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Thanks Andrew for another terrific contribution to this discussion. However I am not persuaded. Here’s why:

The conception of human universality that I favour is one that affirms that all human beings are of equal moral worth, and should be deemed to possess certain basic rights and freedoms in virtue of their humanity (to avoid a pedantic argument about rights, substitute ‘are due certain strong moral obligations’ rather than possessing rights, if you prefer).

This includes, for example, an equal right to protection against violent or cruel treatment of the kind that, I have argued in two of my articles, is routinely inflicted on vulnerable aboriginal people in Australia to this day and ignored or tolerated by the feminists and human rights activists you would expect to object strenuously, because of ‘cultural sensitivities’.

Likewise, I gave the example of feminists like Germaine Greer insisting that for governments to stop the dreadful practice of female genital mutilation of young children (now endemic in the UK, but also a growing problem here) would be ‘culturally arrogant’.

In these cases, respect for identity and culture trumps (no pun intended) the core human right to protection against cruelty and violence. I find this situation, a direct result of the prevalence of identarian thinking, morally odious and racist in that it prescribes a lower standard of protection for those severely disadvantaged people affected.

I also strongly believe that all people, irrespective of identity affiliations, should be deemed to have an equal right to speak freely. This is effectively denied by identarian ‘progressives’ who vilify dissenters like the Pakistani-American Sarah Haider or the aboriginal Australian Jacinta Price, as I described in my articles.

Likewise I am not persuaded by the thought experiments envisaged by you, in the excellent philosophical company of Tony Lynch and Bernard Williams.

In one of the articles I state that I support a broadly Utilitarian approach to moral decision making, especially when it comes to public policy. I conceded that the strongest objections to Utilitarianism arise from our sense we have special obligations to family, friends etc.

I fail to see how my position implies that we are obligated to try and mentally aggregate the sum total of human suffering. Why does this follow from the kind of universalism I have just described? It seems to me a non sequitur.

It is a bit like the claim that a Utilitarian is required to engage in a constant, minute-to-minute calculation of the consequences of every action. Someone who did this would soon be consigned to a mental asylum, and become completely ineffective as a utility-maximizing moral agent. Approaches like Rule Utilitarianism are intended to overcome this absurdity. Aside from which, there is a straightforward Utilitarian rationale for focusing on those we are closest to for practical reasons of proximity and familiarity. This, in my view, is a quite different kind of proximity argument to that proposed by the identarians who demand group solidarity – and recognition of group rights based on identity.

Furthermore it is not even a proper thought experiment since no human being is remotely capable of such an act. Any entity that would be so capable would presumably have a correspondingly greater capacity to process the experience, so the argument falls flat. In reality, the burdens and benefits of the totality of human experience (the pluses and minuses) is shared by the totality of humanity.